Free Crucifixion Creek by Barry Maitland Page A

She looks terrified. ‘If they catch you you’ll lose your job,
everything. You’ll go to jail. It’s not worth it, Harry.’
    He kisses her and she clings to him and finally he has to ease out of her grip. ‘Don’t
worry.’
    Jenny closes the front door after him and turns back into the house, feeling sick
with foreboding. What if they arrest him? She has to try to block this feeling of
helplessness every time he goes off to work, to face who knows what. She hates feeling
so vulnerable.
    She climbs the stairs, up past the bedroom floor to the attic room under the roof.
Up here where a small window looks out through the branches of the plane tree, it
feels like a children’s tree house. This was Harry’s father’s sanctuary, his study,
and there is still a faint lingering smell of the small cigars that he liked to smoke
when he had to do some serious thinking. It comforts her to come up here. She misses
them both, Mary earthy and indomitable, and Danny with that impish sense of humour
that used to delight Greg and Nicole’s little girls, filling their house with shrieks
and giggles. And Jenny listening to them with an ache in her belly, wanting so much
to have children of her own to join in.
    The walls are lined with shelving carrying hundreds of books, box files, diaries
and law magazines. Somewhere among them may be the answer to why he and Mary died,
if Harry is right in his belief that their deaths were deliberate. In the hours he’s
spent searching the documents he’s come up with a long list of possible lethal motives.
Danny Belltree was involved in a lot of cases during his long legal career.
    Jenny sits in his old office chair and runs her fingers over his smooth cedar table
top. By the time she was released from hospital after the crash, Harry had moved
back into his parents’ house. He brought her here, and they have been here ever since.
It’s a much nicer home than the ugly little flat in Bondi, but still, she doesn’t
know if it was a good idea. Surely the constant presence of his parents in every
room fuels his obsession to explain their deaths—when in truth, as the coroner decided,
there may not be an explanation to find.
    When she returned from the hospital and first began to learn how to live a blind
life, she started with this house. She learned from painful experience its traps
and dangers for the unsighted. And she trained her memory and inner eye to reconstruct
its geometry, its details. She felt the dimensions and texture of each piece of furniture,
each picture on the walls, and built their images in her mind. Over there, for example,
in the angle beneath the sloping surface of the roof, is a 1965 photograph of the
young Danny and Mary on the Freedom Ride in Moree, protesting for the civil rights
of Indigenous Australians. She looks impassioned, pretty and pale. He stands at her
side, awkward. Proud. It was through them, doing research work in Danny’s chambers,
that Jenny first met Harry. She sometimes wonders if they chose her for him.

12
    It is now one-forty, the same time that Greg died, which seems auspicious somehow.
He finds a parking space in The Rocks and walks back up into the business district
with the bag slung on his back. As he approaches the glass cylinder of the Gipps
Tower he makes a brief call to Jenny, ‘Ready to go.’ He pulls on latex gloves and
walks down the ramp of the tower’s basement to a pedestrian door at the foot, where
he taps in the entry code on the keypad. Half expecting nothing to happen, he tries
the handle. The door opens silently and he steps inside. Halfway down a bare corridor
there’s a door into one of the fire escape stairwells that rise through the building
and he begins his climb.
    When he emerges into the lobby of the twenty-third floor there is only low-level
emergency lighting. No lights show through the glass doors of the tenants’ offices
that he passes to get to Bluereef Financial Services—also in darkness. Again the
entry code